Australia’s advertising landscape is becoming harder to define by traditional agency labels alone. Creative agencies now work across brand strategy, advertising, content, PR, social, experience, technology and reputation, often bringing several disciplines together around a single business problem. That makes choosing an agency less about finding a universal “best” and more about understanding what a particular agency is built to do.
Several Australian agencies illustrate some of those different approaches particularly clearly in 2026: HERO, SMART, The Red Republic and BBE. Their strengths sit in different parts of the creative and communications landscape. For marketers considering an agency partner, the useful question is not simply who has won the most awards. It is what an agency is good at, how it approaches a problem, what evidence it can show and whether its model fits the challenge.
HERO: Creative Advertising, Brand Strategy and Effectiveness
HERO is an Australian independent creative agency with offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Founded by Ben Lilley in 2020, the agency has built its positioning around the relationship between creativity and effectiveness, working with brands including Toyota, Mastercard, Fujifilm Instax, Maybelline New York, Bakers Delight and Crown Resorts. Its recent industry recognition provides one indication of how quickly the agency has established itself in the independent market.
In 2026, HERO became the first Australian agency to reach the global top two at the World Independent Advertising Awards, placing second overall after ranking sixth globally in 2025. The work itself provides a clearer picture of the agency’s approach. For Mastercard, HERO created Transit Tales, an AI-powered storytelling platform built around Sydney’s public transport network. The experience generated personalised stories for commuters at scale, combining data, technology and creative writing rather than treating AI as the idea in itself.
The platform created more than 38 million possible story combinations and generated more than 25,900 minutes of storytelling, while Mastercard reported a 6.5 per cent uplift in spend and a 9 per cent uplift in transaction volume during the campaign. For Fujifilm Instax, HERO developed Mindography, using fMRI brain scanning and machine learning to explore the relationship between photography and human emotion. For Maybelline New York, Through Their Eyes used live voice-changing technology to expose male gamers to the experience of gender-based harassment in online gaming. The campaign generated 450 million global impressions and won a Silver Cannes Lion.
Those examples point to a consistent distinction in HERO’s recent work: technology is generally being used in service of a creative idea rather than being presented as the proposition itself. AI, data and other emerging technologies become useful when they make an idea more distinctive, participatory or effective. That approach is also visible in HERO’s earlier work for Victoria Police. The Senior Constable Laurie Fox campaign used deepfake technology to bring the late officer’s likeness and voice into a peer-to-peer mental health message for police. The work became a major creative and effectiveness breakthrough for the agency, winning two Gold APAC Effies.
Taken together, the work positions HERO primarily as a creative agency with a strong interest in strategy and effectiveness, with technology available as another creative tool.
SMART: Strategy, Creativity and Integrated Marketing
SMART represents a different version of the Australian independent agency model. The business was launched in Melbourne in 2000 and has worked with brands including adidas, ANZ, Coca-Cola, Ferrero, Levi’s, McDonald’s, Specsavers, Unilever, Volvo and Vodafone. Its current offering spans brand strategy and consulting, creative, design, content, PR and multi-channel campaign production. That breadth is important because some marketing challenges are difficult to separate neatly into brand, creative or communications. A business undergoing a major repositioning, entering a new market or trying to create consistency across multiple channels may need strategic and creative disciplines working together from the outset.
SMART’s history also gives it a different perspective from newer independents. The agency became part of McCann Worldgroup in 2011 before being relaunched as an independent business in a later iteration. Its long-standing client relationships and experience across strategy, creative and brand innovation give it a broader consulting and integrated-marketing orientation. For marketers, the distinction is less about whether SMART is creative and more about the breadth of the problem it can address. Its model brings strategic consulting, creative development and communications closer together, which can be useful when the brief extends beyond a single campaign.
The Red Republic: Creative Communications, PR and Reputation
The Red Republic sits further towards the communications end of the creative agency spectrum. The agency describes itself as a creative, content and communications business, with capabilities spanning brand strategy, creative development, content, social media, PR, influencer management, activations, events, sponsorships and digital production. Its client work includes brands such as CommBank, Telstra, Myer, Carnival Cruise Line, Westfield and Primo. That makes The Red Republic particularly relevant to campaigns where the idea needs to travel beyond paid advertising. A creative platform might need to generate earned media, social conversation, creator participation, events or partnerships as well as traditional advertising. In those situations, the boundary between creative campaign and communications campaign becomes less important than whether the idea can create attention across multiple environments. The Red Republic’s history reflects that communications-led heritage. The business began as a PR operation before expanding into broader creative, digital, social and experiential work. Its role in the Australian agency landscape is therefore not simply about producing advertising. It is about developing ideas and communications that can move between earned, owned and social channels, with reputation and audience response forming part of the problem from the beginning.
BBE: Experience, Technology and Brand Innovation
BBE takes another route, focusing on brand experience, technology, digital and performance. The agency’s work spans technology platforms, digital products, experiences and marketing activity for organisations including Qantas, Medibank, Minderoo Foundation, Victoria Police, Lifeblood, Momentum Energy and KAYAK. One useful example is BBE’s work around Victoria Police’s Bluespace wellbeing platform. Rather than treating technology as a standalone novelty, the work sits within a broader digital experience designed to provide police employees and their families with access to mental health and wellbeing information and support. BBE’s broader technology work includes AI-enabled platforms and digital tools developed for major brands and organisations. For organisations looking beyond conventional advertising towards digital products, customer experiences, marketing platforms or technology-enabled engagement, that capability can be materially different from what a traditional creative advertising agency is designed to provide.
What Should Marketers Look For in a Creative Agency?
There is no single model that works for every marketing problem. The more useful approach is to look at the capability a brief actually requires.
Strategic depth
A good agency should be able to understand more than the communications task. That means getting to grips with the business objective, audience, category, competitive environment and the role the brand needs to play. The important question is what happens before the creative work appears. Does the agency understand the problem it is being asked to solve?
Creative thinking
Technology has made it easier to produce content at scale. That makes the underlying idea more important, not less. The strongest creative work still needs something people can recognise, remember, experience or talk about. Whether the output is a television campaign, social activation, brand platform, digital experience or PR idea, the technology should support the idea rather than substitute for one. Effectiveness Awards can demonstrate creative quality, but effectiveness asks a different question: what did the work actually achieve? Depending on the brief, that might mean sales, brand growth, consideration, engagement, behaviour change, reputation or another defined business outcome. HERO’s Victoria Police work is an example of effectiveness being central to the creative challenge, while Mastercard Transit Tales demonstrates how a technology-enabled idea can be connected to measurable commercial outcomes.
Senior involvement
The agency that wins a pitch is not necessarily the same agency a client experiences six months later. For major campaigns and brand platforms, it is worth understanding who will actually be involved in the work, how accessible senior strategy and creative leaders are, and how the agency operates once the initial brief has been agreed. This is one area where independent agency models can differ significantly from larger network structures, although the distinction varies from agency to agency.
Integrated capability
Advertising increasingly overlaps with PR, social, creators, content, experience, technology and paid media. That does not mean every agency needs to do everything. It means marketers should understand where an agency’s core capability ends and where specialist partners or other agencies become part of the model. The Red Republic, for example, is structured around creative communications and earned, owned and social activity, while BBE has built capabilities around digital experiences and technology. SMART brings strategy, creative and communications together, while HERO’s recent work places creative thinking, brand strategy and effectiveness at the centre.
Technology with a purpose
AI and emerging technology are changing what agencies can make and how quickly they can make it. But technology alone does not make a campaign interesting. The more useful question is: what does the technology enable that would otherwise be difficult or impossible? Transit Tales is one example. The technology allowed Mastercard and HERO to create personalised storytelling at a scale that would not have been practical through conventional production. BBE’s technology platforms demonstrate another route, where digital infrastructure becomes part of the customer experience itself. The technology is different, but the principle is similar: start with the problem and the idea, then determine what technology can add.
The Australian Agency Landscape Is Becoming More Diverse
The Australian creative agency market is increasingly diverse in both structure and capability. HERO represents an independent creative model built around creativity, brand strategy and effectiveness. SMART combines strategic consulting, creativity and integrated marketing. The Red Republic operates across creative communications, PR, social, content and reputation. BBE works at the intersection of brand experience, digital, technology and performance. These are different approaches to a common challenge: helping organisations connect with people in ways that are distinctive and useful to the brand. For marketers exploring the Australian creative agency landscape in 2026, that distinction is worth keeping in mind. An agency’s award record can tell you something. So can its client list. But neither tells the whole story. Look at the work. Look at the people behind it. Understand how the agency thinks about the problem. Then look at the results it has achieved and the kind of relationship it builds with clients. That is usually a more useful starting point than simply looking for a league table.
